Online Death Indexes

Online Death Indexes provide useful sources of birth and death information. For the most part, these Death Indexes are transcriptions of other Indexes and are subject to the errors associated with transcriptions.

My Great Aunt Mary is listed in the Massachusetts Death Index at Ancestry.com. The information provided there includes:

Name: Mary M. Golinski

Certificate Number: 045417

Death Place: Worcester

Death Date: 18 Sep 1975

Birth Place: Other

Birth Date: —

For many of the entries in the Massachusetts Death Index, the birth date is provided. Unfortunately, this is not the case for my Great Aunt Mary. Nonetheless, the Death Index can certainly be considered a secondary source for death information and may even help locate the death certificate itself.

Hi Steve,
Your readers in West Virginia can get images of documents of Birth, Marriage and Death records free online from http://www.wvculture.org also. Just click on the Archives tab at the top. Then click on Vital Records Research.

Thanks for the addition, Joe! I have used the resources at your website before with great success. I just browsed through your site again and noticed that in addition to death indexes and records you’ve also included information on cemeteries and obituaries. Hmmm… maybe it’s time for me to write an entry on obituaries…

Hi Melanie, thanks for the information! I always like to see images of vital records available online. Now I have to search my Family Tree Maker file and see if anyone was born, married, or died in West Virginia!

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